AuthorMolly Wooders
LinkedIn
Your navigation menu is where both users and Google find your most important links and navigate through your site.
When it gets closer to the busy periods in your business, for example, a Sale or Christmas, we want to ensure our navigation menu gives customers an easy way to shop.
The Importance of Navigation
We want to have a navigation that our customers can easily use. This means adding links to priority collection and product pages. A navigation menu should help customers on their purchasing journey, so it’s important we have the right links in there. If our customers can’t navigate the site, there is a higher chance they will bounce off our website.
As we create a navigation, we think about how users can interact with it. We also need to think about indexation. The menu is one of the first places that Google will crawl so it should link to important and indexed pages - this is good to know when it comes to our busy periods.
What Busy Periods Do We Need to Be Aware Of?
Depending on your business, there will be different periods that will be applicable for you and some that aren’t. These are the types of periods to be aware of:
Sales
Sales will be applicable to pretty much most businesses. Sales tend to happen around about the same time for all companies but there might be ones which happen at different times for businesses.
Black Friday & Cyber Monday is a sale event which we want to be prepared for & think about how and when to add to the navigation menu.
Product & Collection/Collaboration Launches
If there is a popular product or collection launch, we might want to think about adding it to the very top of the menu. This will give it the most visibility at launch before adding it within sub-collections.
Seasonal Periods
Seasonal events like Christmas and Mother’s Day, which happen once a year need to be carefully planned for the navigation menu. We want to make sure both customers and Google are aware of these pages weeks before the actual day.
Tips for Optimising the Nav Menu for Busy Periods
Choose URLs & Stick to Them
The first thing we want to do is get a list of the URLs you want to add to the navigation menu. Crawl the website to get a list & prioritise the commercial pages that are indexed.
It's also good to look at any supporting informational pages like blog posts and store these within the same document - we recommend using a Google Sheet to organise your URLs.
Placement & Categorisation
Once you have your list of URLs, you now want to think about where on the navigation menu you want to place them. If it is a sale page - we recommend to keep it at the top of the navigation at either end for ultimate visibility for users. Having the font in red resonates with customers and makes it easier to spot. Although the colour of anchor text doesn’t impact SEO, it does create a sense of urgency for customers to click on the page.
If you have a list of URLs that sit under a specific category, for example, gifts by price, or recipient, you will need to track where these links will sit under. See an example below of John Lewis’s website where it lists subcategories under their relevant parent category. In a Google Sheet (or Miro) you can structure the navigation before you set changes to see how it will look.
Navigations should be easy to - well - navigate. By plotting this out we can see whether this is easy to understand from a US perspective.
Optimised Anchor Text
Anchor text is an important part of our internal linking strategy during busy periods. In the navigation, the link text allows users and Google to understand what the page is about whilst improving the keyword performance of that page.
During our busy periods, we want to make sure that anchor text on the navigation will help customers to know which page they need to go to. In our Google Sheet, we can then map out what anchor text we will be using for our list of pages going on the nav menu. We want to make sure that it includes the target keyword to boost the visibility of the page e.g. Christmas Stocking Fillers.
Supporting Blog Pages
Although we want to prioritise commercial pages that drive revenue, adding relevant blog posts can help provide more information to the customer.
Blog posts can help to drive engagement and build trust with the customer. Adding these types of pages can attract customers in the awareness stage of the purchasing journey who need more information before making a purchase. Below you can see how Oliver Bonas adds links to supporting blog content around Christmas gift ideas in their menu drop-down.
Mobile Friendly
If you can, it is best to make changes to the navigation on a staging site first. This allows us to see that the links are crawlable as well as seeing how easy it is to use the menu.
Google indexes mobile-first, so we want to make sure that the navigation menu is mobile-friendly. If customers find it difficult to find your pages especially if they are seasonal pages, there is a risk of losing these valuable customers.
When To Add Your Links On The Menu During Peak Periods
It’s important to add the links to the navigation at the right time. For product launches for a specific date, naturally, you will add the link to the menu on the launch day. You can, however, build up awareness of a product launch through other channels, including email marketing and social media as well as having a landing page dedicated to the launch for email capture, so that customers can be notified as well as being guided to the website on the day it goes live.
For seasonal events like Christmas, Mother’s Day or Easter, you will want to add the links to the navigation menu a little earlier than the day the season starts. This allows Google time to crawl the navigation and find the pages sooner to rank them. For users, it also allows them the time needed to find their product and have it delivered to them.
You can follow our recommended timeline for the Christmas period to make sure Google and users can benefit from your content.
This timeline can be replicated for other seasonal periods like Mother’s Day where it gives you an idea of how far back to add links to the navigation and other areas like the homepage.
Once the seasonal event is over, we recommend making sure that we handle links to the page properly. For example, with a Christmas landing page, we recommend removing the link to the page from the main navigation menu. This is to ensure that customers aren’t confused as to why the Christmas page is still up in March as an example.
However, we still want to keep this page live as it gives it time to remain visible to Google and gain SEO value until next Christmas and then you can start the timeline above all over again. This of course needs to be replicated for other seasonal events.
Takeaways
A navigation menu is one of the foundations of a website. It is the base of where people find the products they are looking to purchase. It also is one of the first places Google will crawl, so you want to make sure all of the important pages are linked so that search engines can index and rank them.
Get ahead of the curve and organise your navigation menu before your busiest period. Add in the important links with optimised anchor text to boost visibility. You can also read our blog on other tips to optimise your site for seasonal peaks.
